What kind of party would feature pushing, shoving, fighting and the discussion of the murder of a two year old toddler? The birthday party for a seven-year-old boy, of course. While a child's birthday party might seem like an unlikely place to examine such dark notions, Sharon Olds, free verse poem, "Rites of Passage" does so in a powerful and unique way. The poem is a mother's detached and dispassionate observation of her sons 7th birthday party, and how even at such a young age, boys are already taking on the aggressive and destructive behaviors of adult men. The imagery of the poem is made more vivid and starkly alarming paradoxically not by a narrator that is deeply connected and positively or negatively attached to the event but rather by a mother that is relentlessly neutral and detached in her observations.
The mother persona of this poem is not the prototypical mom greeting the children cheerfully for her son's celebration, but rather is a neutral and almost clinical observer who seems to be almost floating above the party instead of engaged in the moment-to-moment activity. Instead of describing her son's guests each as individuals, the imagery of the poem describes the boys as an indistinguishable whole. "Short men, men in first grade/with smooth jaws and chins" (3-4). With this last line she sets up a contradictory and disturbing image of small serious men with the faces of young innocent boys. .
Her still life observation takes on movement and sound at line 5 as the guests, reluctantly at first, begin to interact with each other in ways that slowly get more chaotic and finally culminates in aggressive speech. .
Hands in pockets, they stand around.
jostling, jockeying for place, small fights.
breaking out and calming. One says to another.
How old are you? Six, I'm Seven. So? (5-8).
The guests continue to posture aggressively with intense seriousness and in this atmosphere even the chocolate birthday cake becomes a metaphor for a battlement of war when the birthday boy's mother describes it as "the dark cake, round and heavy as a/turret" (14-15).
